If the province approves a plan to devote property tax to transit expansion, your taxes will go up about 2 per cent next year — $45 per household, on average, toward the proposed dedicated transit fund based on a property valued at $447,090. If your house is worth less, you’ll pay less; if it’s worth more, you’ll pay more.

To figure out roughly how much that means, consider that your property taxes went up 2.5 per cent this year, or $60 on average.

The transit differential will continue to accumulate for four years, so that same household would pay $90 in 2014, $135 in 2015 and $180 in 2016. At that point, the transit portion of your tax bill ceases to rise. The money it raises, estimated to be about $272 million a year, would be entirely dedicated to transit.

But that doesn’t mean your overall property tax bill won’t be higher in the future. The city would still have the option of raising its annual general tax rate that pays for the TTC’s operating subsidy, daycares, parks and other services. Mayor Rob Ford has said, for example, that next year’s property taxes are likely to rise between 1.5 per cent and 2 per cent.

How about residents who don’t own homes?

Stintz and De Baeremaeker are asking council to approve a staff study that would look at the plan’s impact on all property taxpayers, said Stintz. “It’s not just homes that will be taxed. It will be all classes in the city,” she said.

When will construction start?

It’s not clear exactly when shovels would go in the ground, but among the 21 lines proposed in the OneCity plan, two have been identified as the priority starting projects because they already have cash commitments from other sources.

The first is the conversion of the Scarborough Rapid Transit line to a subway, rather than an LRT, which is the current council-approved plan. The province has said it would pay $1.8 billion for that project. Turning that line into a subway instead would cost more — about $2.3 billion.

But it would avoid the problem of closing down the SRT for four years while the route is converted to an extension of the Eglinton LRT, and it would save the TTC the cost of running 43 shuttle buses to provide the 40,000 rides a day the SRT supplies.

The conversion to LRT was slated to begin in 2015, as soon as the Pan Am Games end. It’s not clear whether subway work could begin earlier, given that it would travel on a slightly different route.

The second priority project is a Waterfront East streetcar running from Union Station along the lakeshore east of Yonge St. That route has a $90 million commitment from Waterfront Toronto. But a streetcar would cost about $200 million more than that, not because of the rails but because the streetcar would travel underground from Union to Queens Quay. So tunneling and building a portal where it comes onto the street would be costly.

Councillor Pam McConnell's office said the environmental assessments and design are complete on the east waterfront streetcar. All that remains is to put the project out to tender.

What happens next?

Stintz and De Baeremaeker will ask City Council next month to approve doing a study of the OneCity proposal. Councillors would then have until October to speak to residents about the lines and the funding plan and to discuss the vision among themselves. In October, council would be asked to approve the plan. If it gets that approval, it would then be incorporated into the city’s Official Plan.

Meantime, the province would have to consider whether to allow the city to devote a portion of its property taxes to a dedicated transit fund. It would also need to decide whether to change the existing agreement to convert the SRT into a subway rather than an LRT.

A decision on the SRT’s future has to be approved relatively soon because the current agreement between the province and the city to build four LRT lines, including a replacement for the SRT, is expected to go to the provincial cabinet within six months.

Won’t building all these transit lines mean traffic chaos for years to come?

Major transit projects inevitably involve traffic disruptions, city and provincial officials admit. The TTC and Metrolinx have already begun preparing residents for lane closures on Eglinton, where virtually every major intersection along the 11-km tunneled section of the Crosstown LRT will need to be torn up to build stations.

The bigger threat, say civic leaders and politicians, is the perpetual traffic chaos if the city doesn’t radically expand its transit system. Traffic congestion costs the Toronto region $6 billion a year in lost productivity. That’s expected to more than double in 20 years under the status quo.

Metrolinx warns that the region’s 82-minute average commute is on track to increase by 30 per cent over the same period. That means we could be spending 109 minutes a day just getting to and from work.

Does the city have the money to operate all these new lines, or will fares have to cover the increased cost?

The dedicated transit funds will be applied only to construction costs. How the TTC comes up with money to operate the new lines isn’t yet known, said Stintz.

The TTC is already subsidized by the city to the tune of about $500 million annually.

“We know we have an operating issue that is ongoing. It will only increase as our network increases,” said Stintz. “There may come a point where we need to go back to the public and ask for their support on the operating side.”

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